Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker challenged her senior technology managers to be more collaborative and coordinated in modernizing the agency’s technology infrastructure.

The result of that challenge is a four-pronged approach to the sharing of IT resources.

Steve Cooper, the Commerce Department’s chief information officer, said four working groups are examining the opportunities across technology, finance, human resources and acquisition.

“We are moving toward achieving true shared services in the sense that whatever services are identified by each of those work streams we will then, most likely — and we haven’t done this yet but this is where we are heading — by the end of quarter two or the beginning of quarter three of this fiscal year so we are making very good progress…the idea will be for those services that we agree are viable and could be delivered through a shared services set of providers,” Cooper said. “We’ll likely create an organization inside the Department of Commerce that then would be tasked with the responsibility to select those providers in each of the four functional areas, manage, put service level agreements in place, put appropriate metrics in place and ensure the successful quality delivery of those shared services.”

Cooper said the bureau level CIOs are very supportive of this effort, which, in some ways, pleasantly surprised him.

The massive cyber attack on Anthem has prompted top White House advisers to encourage Congress to fast-track legislation to bolster the protection of consumer data.

This latest breach, which exposed the sensitive information of 80 million of the managed health services company’s current and former customers and employees, makes the case for “a single national standard to protect consumers from data breaches,” John Podesta, counselor to President Obama, told reporters in a Thursday conference call, according to a Bloomberg report.

Anthem Inc., one of the country’s biggest health insurers, has been hit by a major cyberattack that could affect millions of its customers and employees. As news of the large-scale hack broke late Feb. 4, it was already having a ripple effect on Capitol Hill, with a top lawmaker calling on Congress to pass information-sharing legislation in response.

Hackers stole personal information from current and former Anthem members, including Social Security numbers, street and email addresses, and income data, the insurer said a statement that described the hack as “very sophisticated.” The firm said it had seen no evidence that credit card or medical information was compromised.

The hackers penetrated an Anthem database housing the personal information of 80 million Anthem customers and employees, the Wall Street Journal reported.

In a statement, the FBI said it was investigating the Anthem hack and praised the company’s swift response.

The Department of Homeland Security has a new big idea for improving the cybersecurity of federal agencies and key private industries: big data.

A White House progress report released Feb. 5 detailing how the federal government is seizing big data opportunities said DHS is “working across government and the private sector to identify and leverage the opportunities big data analytics presents to strengthen cybersecurity.”

When queried by Nextgov, a DHS spokesman declined to provide details about the big data efforts outlined in the report.

But in a conference call with members of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee that same day, White House and DHS officials provided glimpses into a number of ongoing initiatives that aim to fuse traditional cyber-defense methods with the real-time intelligence rendered by robust data analytics.

The rapidly growing popularity of wearable devices will lead to a surge in volume of mobile traffic, Cisco is predicting.

Cisco forecasts that 578 million wearable devices will be in use around the globe by 2019, up from 109 million last year. That’s a fivefold increase, but the resulting mobile data traffic will increase by a factor of 18 — though most of that traffic will be channeled through smartphones, the networking giant claimed Tuesday in its annual look ahead at traffic trends.

Some wearables, like the upcoming Apple Watch, require using a smartphone to transmit data. But the devices on average already generate six times more traffic per month than a basic handset, Cisco said. Its high-end example of a wearable is a GoPro video cameras, which can generate about 5 MB of mobile data traffic per minute when live streaming.

Overall, there will be 11.5 billion mobile connections by 2019. Of those, 8.3 billion will come from personal mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, which Cisco claimed will see a resurgence as they take on more features found in tablets.

Conventional methods to detect and mitigate threats from drones are limited; radars either don’t detect drones or characterize them incorrectly (i.e. migratory birds). Additionally, if radar does detect the drone, it cannot mitigate the threat or identify the source. Clearly a comprehensive solution that finds and IDs the drone platform, mitigates the threat safely, and provides forensic evidence to government and law enforcement officials is necessary whether you’re protecting the Super Bowl, an airport, or a government facility.

As I mentioned last time, drones have onboard logic and communications channels, therefore the use of advanced cybersecurity platform protection techniques can be employed. Defense contractors and technology companies alike are developing cybersecurity solutions to address the aforementioned challenges. One approach that has been developed creates a “cyber fence” that employs the use of cyber defense techniques found on traditional IT networks, except it uses those techniques against platforms such as drones. This cyber fence can be integrated into other physical, electronic, and cyber defense mechanisms to offer full protection against this threat.

Utah state officials have seen what they describe as a sharp uptick in attempts to hack into state computers in the last two years, and they think it related to the NSA data center south of Salt Lake City.

The increase began in early 2013 as international attention focused on the NSA’s $1.7 billion warehouse to store massive amounts of information gathered secretly from phone calls and emails.

While most of the attempts are likely innocuous, cyber experts say it is possible low-level hackers, “hactivists” unhappy with the NSA’s tactics, and some foreign criminal groups might erroneously think the state systems are linked to the NSA.